TL;DR;

• Fairdrive project has reached the end of the exploratory stage. Based on learning, Fair Data Protocol development has now started, bringing Fairdrive to production and enabling a fair data economy.
• As a truly open and collaborative protocol, development is supported through the FIP process.
• Join the movement! This is the opportunity for developers to shape a protocol enabling self-sovereign digital societies. Suggest your requirements and standards e.g. video streaming, communication, identity,...

Fairdrive can be characterized as a personal cloud drive, based on decentralised storage. From a person's perspective, it is a self-sovereign solution, where you don't depend on any one cloud provider, but instead trust a network of peers. It is also a place where you could keep all your data in a "central" location, making use of it or giving access to it to different services. Its development is a community effort, empowered by many entities and developers - all the while following the Fair Data Society Principles (https://fairdatasociety.org/) as the guidance.

Fairdrive levels the playing field for all actors wanting to take part in a fair data economy and unlocks new opportunities by enabling a fair distribution of value and giving agency to the user.

Currently Fairdrive can be considered to be a sandbox environment for developers and end users to experiment with decentralized storage while moving towards a fair data economy and society. Although this exploration stage has been very fruitful, based on its learnings, an even more interesting stage is starting.

To move from the sandbox state to a more robust production environment, work is in progress on Fair Data Protocol, a set of specifications and implementations, addressing areas needed on this path, including: data structures, authentication, authorisation, registries, interoperability, to name just a few.

The general flow of the roadmap is such that for each of the 6 milestones, specifications covering different areas will be written. Based on these specifications, reference implementations will be developed.

The specific areas the Fair Data Protocol will cover are:

We invite you to take a more detailed look at the Fair Data Protocol roadmap in the Fairdrive Improvement Proposals repo: https://github.com/fairDataSociety/FIPs/blob/master/text/0001-fdp-roadmap.md

Milestone I, Review, will cover the review of currently used data structures and business logic to come up with a proposal for data structures, preprocessor library and a feeds library.

Milestone II, Registries, will include work on specifying the registries for dApp store, users and others, and providing smart contract interfaces, registry protocols and the FairDataRegistry library.

Milestone III, Authentication, will tackle session handling, SSO, workflow for login and produce an authentication library, browser extension and a command line interface.

Milestone IV, Authorization, will address data sharing with other users and dApps, access control lists, interactions with personal user data and result in an authorization library.

Milestone V, Data economics, will focus on web 3 P2P services, monetisation of data and services and result in a P2P backend service framework, a set of smart contracts, signed-based data market protocol and library interface to data market.

Milestone VI, Interoperability, will bring even higher level primitives, interoperability with other P2P storage, integrations with other applications and databases along with appropriate migrations tools.

Each area to be covered by the roadmap, will go through a Fairdrive improvement proposal (FIP) process, with time for interested parties to comment on it. The FIP process itself is meant to be used by community contributions, as improvements to the areas will be identified.

It is an exciting time for developers to join in shaping the Fair Data Protocol through the FIP process.

For discussing Fair Data Protocol, feel free to use the Discord channel #fdp-general: https://discord.gg/EBE3SRKY

Fair Data Society is incubated under Swarm and the Fair Data Protocol project was made possible by support from Swarm.

Join the FDS Community

• Fair Data Society website.
• Read the Fair Data Society principles.
• Fairdrive website.
• Follow us on Twitter.
• Join our discussions at Discord.
• Please feel free to reach out via email: info@fairdatasociety.org